THE DEEP ONES: "The Statement of Randolph Carter" by H. P. Lovecraft
ConversesThe Weird Tradition
Afegeix-te a LibraryThing per participar.
1semdetenebre
"The Statement of Randolph Carter" by H.P. Lovecraft
Discussion begins August 17, 2022.
First published in the May 1920 issue of The Vagrant.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41870
SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
ONLINE VERSIONS
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/src.aspx
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8129/pg8129.html
ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrNiIw_iDTc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTfS6igpWpw
MISCELLANY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBcYaCQoK0E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Statement_of_Randolph_Carter
https://tinyurl.com/8dxrudns
Discussion begins August 17, 2022.
First published in the May 1920 issue of The Vagrant.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41870
SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS
At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft
Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
ONLINE VERSIONS
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/src.aspx
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8129/pg8129.html
ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrNiIw_iDTc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTfS6igpWpw
MISCELLANY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBcYaCQoK0E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Statement_of_Randolph_Carter
https://tinyurl.com/8dxrudns
2RandyStafford
Read this out of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, and it had been a long time since reading it before.
I forgotten just how many Lovecraft tales mention or feature Randolph Carter. I like how Carter, Lovecraft's alter ego, is so nervous and untrustworthy.
Interesting that, while what Warren discovers isn't exactly explained, it's heavily intimated, with the word "necrophagous", that the cemetery is full of ghouls in this story which predates "Pickman's Model".
I forgotten just how many Lovecraft tales mention or feature Randolph Carter. I like how Carter, Lovecraft's alter ego, is so nervous and untrustworthy.
Interesting that, while what Warren discovers isn't exactly explained, it's heavily intimated, with the word "necrophagous", that the cemetery is full of ghouls in this story which predates "Pickman's Model".
3AndreasJ
This is another minor Lovecraft tale I hadn't read in maybe fifteen years. Unlike some, though, I remembered it pretty well.
Warren's description of Carter as a nervous wreck seems accurate enough here - rather less so in his later appearances.
A thought that struck me on this read is that maybe Carter's recollection really is a dream or vision. The way he remembers it, particularly the early part where he "observes" that he's brought tools, and that "the spot and the task seemed known to us" does strike me more like the recollection of a dream than of a waking experience.
Perhaps supporting such a read, there being a valley with a rim in the Big Cypress Swamp seems odd - the place is basically flat as I understand it.
Now, extra-fictionally, this is obviously because the story is based on one of Lovecraft's dreams, but it may not necessarily be a bad take on what's going on intra-fictionally either.
The explanation why certain corpses remain undecayed after a thousand years presumably does not involve ghouls.
Warren's description of Carter as a nervous wreck seems accurate enough here - rather less so in his later appearances.
A thought that struck me on this read is that maybe Carter's recollection really is a dream or vision. The way he remembers it, particularly the early part where he "observes" that he's brought tools, and that "the spot and the task seemed known to us" does strike me more like the recollection of a dream than of a waking experience.
Perhaps supporting such a read, there being a valley with a rim in the Big Cypress Swamp seems odd - the place is basically flat as I understand it.
Now, extra-fictionally, this is obviously because the story is based on one of Lovecraft's dreams, but it may not necessarily be a bad take on what's going on intra-fictionally either.
The explanation why certain corpses remain undecayed after a thousand years presumably does not involve ghouls.
4papijoe
>3 AndreasJ: I had some topographical issues with the setting as well. I’ve always assumed the Florida water table was close to the surface. Turns out Florida has a huge aquifer that you hit at 70-100ft (23-33 m?) so Warren probably didn’t need that much telephone wire.
I agree it’s one of Lovecraft’s minor stories, but among them it’s one of my favorites. I think refactoring a vivid memorable dream into an acceptable work of fiction is challenging for the most experienced writer. The strongest and weakest elements of the story are due to it’s dream origin. I think he pulled it off, albeit awkwardly.
I agree it’s one of Lovecraft’s minor stories, but among them it’s one of my favorites. I think refactoring a vivid memorable dream into an acceptable work of fiction is challenging for the most experienced writer. The strongest and weakest elements of the story are due to it’s dream origin. I think he pulled it off, albeit awkwardly.
5housefulofpaper
i think I first read this in the S. T. Joshi-edited The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. I think it's a cleverly curated story selection: helped along by Joshi's intoduction, the reader progresses through them in chronological order, seeing not just Lovecraft working through the influence of the fin de siecle decadents, of Poe and Dunsany, but also seeing themes and images that are vital parts of his mature style, and of the Cthulhu Mythos, already present in his earliest published tales.
In this story we have the narrator protesting his innocence and sanity (very Poe-ish, of course, but it just occurred to me that it pre-dates a strain of paranoid Noir thriller, too); graveyards and a visceral reaction to the vegetation that thrives there (a contrast with the current social acceptability and rising popularity of eco-burials); a descent into the depths of the Earth, the border between life and death (even if this doesn't represent the first Lovecraft ghoul story); and the literally unspeakable, indescribable, unnameable, horror.
Given that this is his first appearance, and in a very early story, I wasn't troubled by Carter's nervousness and status as sidekick to a more learned and intrepid (or foolhardy) paranormal investigator.
This time round, I too also read the story in The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (for which, I only recently learned, Leslie. S. Klinger has a page of errata on his website. I think the corrections were incorporated into the second edition, the one with the pink tentacles on a white background). One of Klinger's notes points out that there are possible alternative candidates, in Georgia and in Virginia, for the story's setting.
Just last weekend I read Tour De Lovecraft: The Tales by Kenneth Hite, short literary essays and musings on nearly all Lovecraft's stories. He adds an interesting biographical note - Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy "almost recapitulated this story in 1923, going in search of "Dark Swamp" near Chepachet, but couldn't find it." (But in the dream that inspired the story, Samuel Loveman was the Warren character). Hite also offers his own theory for what the thing could be (and then conceding "or, sure, they might have been ghouls.")
According to Hite, Lovecraft, with or without various pals, went in for quite a lot of what he calls "Blair Witch-esque wandering around in the woods" and thinks it surprising that Lovecraft did relatively little "outdoorsy" horror. For my part, it seems to me that there's a stronger tradition of (unserious) ghost hunting in the States than in the UK.
In this story we have the narrator protesting his innocence and sanity (very Poe-ish, of course, but it just occurred to me that it pre-dates a strain of paranoid Noir thriller, too); graveyards and a visceral reaction to the vegetation that thrives there (a contrast with the current social acceptability and rising popularity of eco-burials); a descent into the depths of the Earth, the border between life and death (even if this doesn't represent the first Lovecraft ghoul story); and the literally unspeakable, indescribable, unnameable, horror.
Given that this is his first appearance, and in a very early story, I wasn't troubled by Carter's nervousness and status as sidekick to a more learned and intrepid (or foolhardy) paranormal investigator.
This time round, I too also read the story in The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (for which, I only recently learned, Leslie. S. Klinger has a page of errata on his website. I think the corrections were incorporated into the second edition, the one with the pink tentacles on a white background). One of Klinger's notes points out that there are possible alternative candidates, in Georgia and in Virginia, for the story's setting.
Just last weekend I read Tour De Lovecraft: The Tales by Kenneth Hite, short literary essays and musings on nearly all Lovecraft's stories. He adds an interesting biographical note - Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy "almost recapitulated this story in 1923, going in search of "Dark Swamp" near Chepachet, but couldn't find it." (But in the dream that inspired the story, Samuel Loveman was the Warren character). Hite also offers his own theory for what the thing could be (and then conceding "or, sure, they might have been ghouls.")
According to Hite, Lovecraft, with or without various pals, went in for quite a lot of what he calls "Blair Witch-esque wandering around in the woods" and thinks it surprising that Lovecraft did relatively little "outdoorsy" horror. For my part, it seems to me that there's a stronger tradition of (unserious) ghost hunting in the States than in the UK.
6semdetenebre
HPL's novel use of technology - low tech though it was - being used to explore the crypt reminded me of the sequence in ALIEN in which the doomed Dallas is communicating back to the crew as he searches through the air vents of the Nostromo.
Klinger's The New Annotated Lovecraft points out that this story is one of a number of appearances by HPL's literary doppelganger, Randolph Carter:
"The Statement of Randolph Carter"
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
"The Unnamable"
"The Silver Key"
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a cameo
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" written with E. Hoffmann Price
"Out of the Aeons" under an alias in a revision done for Hazel Heald
Klinger's The New Annotated Lovecraft points out that this story is one of a number of appearances by HPL's literary doppelganger, Randolph Carter:
"The Statement of Randolph Carter"
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
"The Unnamable"
"The Silver Key"
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward in a cameo
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" written with E. Hoffmann Price
"Out of the Aeons" under an alias in a revision done for Hazel Heald
7papijoe
>6 semdetenebre: Your Alien reference now has me wondering what an H.R Giger illustrated version of this story would be like.
8housefulofpaper
>7 papijoe:
Just today I was reading an article that reminded me Giger had borrowed "Necronomicon" for the title of his 1977 art book (and a sequel from 1985 was titled "Neconomicon II").
The article was illustrated with one of Giger's "biomechnical" paintings that clearly prefigured the adult Alien or Xenomorph design. It had been one of the paintings reproduced in the 1977 "Necronomicon", and the title of the painting was "Necronom IV".
Just today I was reading an article that reminded me Giger had borrowed "Necronomicon" for the title of his 1977 art book (and a sequel from 1985 was titled "Neconomicon II").
The article was illustrated with one of Giger's "biomechnical" paintings that clearly prefigured the adult Alien or Xenomorph design. It had been one of the paintings reproduced in the 1977 "Necronomicon", and the title of the painting was "Necronom IV".
9alaudacorax
>3 AndreasJ:
Carter's inability to remember any of the quite important context for the central events is typical of dreams. Lovecraft's later depiction of him as a deliberate and accomplished dreamer makes me quite nonplussed as to what he, Lovecraft, is intending here. Is there, perhaps, an element of him deliberately teasing the reader?
I hadn't read this for quite a long time, either. It must have made quite an impression, though, as, oddly, I remembered it as a much more substantial story than it actually is.
Carter's inability to remember any of the quite important context for the central events is typical of dreams. Lovecraft's later depiction of him as a deliberate and accomplished dreamer makes me quite nonplussed as to what he, Lovecraft, is intending here. Is there, perhaps, an element of him deliberately teasing the reader?
I hadn't read this for quite a long time, either. It must have made quite an impression, though, as, oddly, I remembered it as a much more substantial story than it actually is.
